Books are fragile things. That is why old books are so precious to us—they've survived the
ravages of time. Imagine, then, how precious centuries-old manuscripts are, those like the
Archimedes palimpsest that were hand-written on parchment and other materials long before the
invention of the printing press in the 15th century. Generations upon generations of caretakers
have ensured the astonishing longevity of these rare documents, which allow scholars and
laypeople alike to peer inside cultures long gone from the world. Here, have a glimpse at
some of the most significant early manuscripts to have turned up in modern times—as well
as the first printed book, which spelled the end of the handwritten volume.

The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79 buried two cities—Pompeii, well
known today as an archeological site, and Herculaneum, once a seaside resort
for wealthy Romans. In the mid-18th century, workers at Herculaneum discovered
more than 1,000 papyrus scrolls that were singed and covered with debris when
volcanic mud buried the city. Scholars later determined that Philodemus, a
philosopher and poet who was a pivotal figure in the transmission of Greek
philosophical ideas to Rome, wrote most of these works.

The Herculaneum Papyri comprise the only extensive library of texts to survive
from the classical world. Because the scrolls are extremely fragile, they were
left untouched for centuries. But in the 1990s, an international group of
scholars began the delicate process of unrolling and interpreting Philodemus'
texts, which include his ideas on poetics, rhetoric, and music. The papyri are
stored at the National Museum in Naples, Italy.

At the foot of Mount Sinai outside Cairo sits a small Greek Orthodox monastery
called St. Catherine's, named for the Russian saint. In 1844, the German
scholar Constantine Tischendorf visited the monastery, where he discovered more
than 300 parchment leaves of the Old Testament and New Testament in Greek
dating back to the 4th century. Collectively, these later became known as the
Codex Sinaiticus, which constitutes one of the earliest versions of the Greek
Bible.

When the Christian monks were unwilling to loan the ancient scrolls to
Tischendorf for scholarly study, he appealed to the Russian czar, Alexander II,
who wielded power over both the Russian and Greek Orthodox churches.
Tischendorf promised Alexander he would turn over the valuable manuscripts to
the Russian Orthodox Church after he translated them. The czar ordered the
monks, who had guarded the codex for centuries, to give it to Tischendorf, who
then went on to translate it. He published his translation in 1862. In 1933,
Russia sold the Codex Sinaiticus to the British government, which now houses it
in the British National Museum.

Since its discovery in 1860, the Madrid Codex, named for the city where it was
found after hundreds of years of obscurity and where it rests today, has
illuminated many mysteries of ancient Mayan culture, religion, and scholarship.
A Spanish priest or explorer likely brought the codex to Spain in the 16th
century, though no one knows for sure how it arrived in Europe from Guatemala,
where it probably originated.

The longest of the existing Maya hieroglyphic manuscripts, the codex contains
over 250 almanacs, which describe events of daily life during the 260-day
Mesoamerican ritual calendar. Scholars believe the codex may be a 14th- or
15th-century copy of Mayan scholarship from the peak of the civilization's
power. The entire Mayan era lasted from roughly 2500 B.C. to A.D. 1500.

The codex's so-called screenfold books, 56 pages in total, are long,
double-sided bark pages rich with detailed glyphs painted over a smooth surface
of hardened lime paste. Mayan priests or nobility might have used these now
fragile manuscripts as personal date-books or registers of the Mayan dynasties.
The codex dates to before the Spanish conquest of Mexico and has survived
numerous abuses, including more than a thousand years of exposure to tropical
weather and, in the 16th century, book burnings by the Spanish clergy.

Only three other Mayan codices remain today. The Dresden and Paris Codices are
on display in the cities for which they were named. The fourth codex, the
Grolier Codex, is named after the Grolier Club in New York, a bibliographic
society that owned the manuscript in the 1970s.

In this detail from an almanac contained in the Madrid
Codex, a hunter returns home with his kill.

In 1947, a Bedouin shepherd exploring caves near Qumran, a ruin on the
northwest shore of the Dead Sea in Israel, discovered a collection of jars
containing seven parchment scrolls. The shepherd took the scrolls to a
Bethlehem antiques dealer, hoping to make a profit. The dealer bought the
scrolls and sold them to the Syrian Orthodox Archbishop of Jerusalem, who
collected religious manuscripts on behalf of his church. Within a year of the
original find, scholars around the world had heard about the scrolls and
flocked to Jerusalem to examine them. When they realized the importance of the
collection, they launched an extensive search for more scrolls in the caves
surrounding the original find.

Archeologists worked on the Qumran site, which includes 11 caves, until 1956,
when the last finds were uncovered there. The parchment scrolls they found, 870
in total, vary in degree of preservation. Some are nearly complete, while
only fragments remain of others. Interpreting the scrolls was a painstakingly
slow process. Over 40 years passed before scholars made the scrolls' contents
available to the public through publications and exhibitions around the
world.

The Dead Sea Scrolls hold great religious and historical value, offering
glimpses into theological and cultural aspects of life during the time of
Jesus. Before the find at Qumran, the oldest known Hebrew Bible dated to around
A.D. 1000. Written in Hebrew and Aramaic, the colloquial language of
Palestinian Jews during the last two centuries B.C. and the first two centuries
A.D., the scrolls are thought to have originated as part of a library that
belonged to a Jewish sect known as the Dead Sea Sect. Members of this group hid
themselves away in the Qumran caves during the First Jewish Revolt against the
Romans in A.D. 66. The scrolls are now on display at the Israel Museum in
Jerusalem.

This brittle page comes from the Scroll of the Rule,
which outlines strict rules of religious conduct and cites possible punishments
for violators.

At the turn of the 20th century, archeologists excavating in caves near a
Buddhist temple in Dunhuang discovered a collection of manuscripts. Dunhuang,
located in Gansu Province in the far northwest of China, was an important city
on the Silk Road, the main trade route between the Roman Empire and China, and
no fewer than 15 languages are represented in the collection.

The trove of manuscripts brought out from the Dunhuang caves includes poems,
religious texts such as the Buddha's sermons, treatises on psychology and feng
shui philosophy, military reports, even prescriptions for arthritis and other
ailments. The majority of the Dunhuang materials date from between 100 B.C. and
A.D. 1200.

Today, more than a century after the discovery, the texts are popular
primary sources for scholarly study all over the world, so much so that
"Dunhuang Studies" has emerged as its own research discipline. Experts have
dated some of the Dunhuang Cave documents to only 500 years after the Buddha's
death, making them among the oldest texts of their kind. The Dunhuang
manuscripts are housed in four major institutions: the National Library of
China, the British Library, the National Library in France, and the Institute
of Oriental Studies in St. Petersburg, Russia.

The Dunhuang caves where archeologists found rare
manuscripts are decorated with colorful frescoes, like this Bodhisattva, which
probably dates to the 7th to 10th centuries A.D.

In its medieval heyday, Novgorod, a city situated between St. Petersburg and
Moscow, was a center of literacy and literary culture. Most of the city's
residents could read and write, and many authors lived and worked there. Since
1932, when excavations began, archeologists have unearthed approximately 1,000
manuscripts in the Novgorod area, and they continue to unearth texts in the
area today.

Many of the Novgorod manuscripts are colloquial letters and stories carved into
either birch bark scrolls or wax tablets known as tseras. Most of them
date from the 11th to the 15th centuries. The soft, smooth textures of birch
tree bark and poured wax were easily scratched with a sharp metal, wood, or
bone tool functioning as a pen. These readily available writing materials were
much less costly than parchment or ink and allowed people of every social class—peasants, artisans, merchants, and so on—to participate in writing.

Topics range from school notes a young boy jotted down in a class to original
speeches and letters written by a prominent Novgorod statesman. Because the
authors of many of the manuscripts were common citizens rather than the
literary elite, their writings provide a rare window into everyday life at the
time, and scholars value the collection for this reason in particular. The
Novgorod manuscripts are kept as part of an extensive collection of local
archeological materials in the city's State United Museum.

A wax tablet containing psalms of David written in
Cyrillic in the early 11th century

Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, written in the Middle Ages, is one
of the first English literary works. An entertaining story involving Chaucer
and 22 companions, who accompany him on a fictional pilgrimage to Archbishop
Thomas Becket's tomb in Canterbury Cathedral, Canterbury Tales has
helped rank Chaucer in the minds of many scholars as second only to Shakespeare
among English authors.

The Ellesmere Manuscript is one of the earliest surviving manuscripts of the
Canterbury Tales. Bound in leather, it is the basis for most editions of
this famous work, as it is in excellent condition and is elaborately decorated.
(Each tale bears a detailed portrait of the teller at the beginning.) Literary
historians believe it was copied less than ten years after Chaucer's death in
1400, making it a particularly valuable record of his work.

The family of the Earl of Ellesmere, a British politician and philanthropist
who died in 1857, sold the manuscript in 1917 to a prominent American
financier,Henry Huntington, for his personal library. The Ellesmere
Manuscript is now held at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

An intricately detailed page from the Ellesmere
Manuscript showing an illustration of Geoffrey Chaucer on horseback

Leonardo da Vinci, the Renaissance artist, scientist, and thinker, wrote the
Codex Leicester in Milan between 1506 and 1510 on 18 loose, double-sided sheets
of linen paper. The manuscript is named after Englishman Thomas Coke, the Earl
of Leicester, whose family owned it from 1717 to 1980. The codex records
Leonardo's thoughts in sepia ink on a variety of topics, from astronomy to
hydrology, and it includes dozensof his sketches, drawings, and
diagrams. Only 31 of Leonardo's original manuscripts survive today—about a
third, scholars believe, of those he likely wrote in his lifetime.

The notebooks are distinctive because they feature rare examples of Leonardo's
use of "mirror writing," which he wrote from right to left and backwards.
Experts are not sure why Leonardo used mirror writing, which only appears
normal in a mirror's reflection. He may have used the technique to prevent
others from reading or stealing his ideas or to prevent ink from smudging (he
was left-handed). Many experts believe that writing backwards might simply have
been more comfortable for him.

In 1994, William H. Gates III, cofounder of the Microsoft Corporation,
bought this manuscript for $30.8 million at auction. Leonardo's codex has been
on display at numerous museums since Gates purchased it, but it will soon be
installed in a climate-controlled vault in Gates' Medina, Washington home.

This detail from the Codex Leicester shows two men
balancing on a seesaw. In the accompanying text, Leonardo describes how objects
move through the air.

Though this text is not a handwritten manuscript, it holds great value because
it is the first book widely printed in the West. In the mid-1450s, Johannes
Gutenberg, a German goldsmith, invented a movable-type system that allowed for
mechanized production of printed books. The first complete book Gutenberg
printed was the Bible, which he ran off his Mainz, Germany press around
1456.

Historians believe Gutenberg printed about 200 copies of the two-volume Bible
in the original printing, but today only 48 copies of the text still exist.
Just three of these are considered to be in perfect condition, while the rest
are only partial copies. After each book came off the printing press, local
artisans added large capital letters and decorative flourishes by hand to each
book. The result is that no two copies of the Bible are exactly the same.

The Gutenberg Bible marked the beginning of the mass-production of affordable
books. Ironically, perfect surviving copies of the Gutenberg Bible are now so
costly and rare that they are kept in some of the world's most vaunted
institutions. The Library of Congress has one of the complete copies, printed
on vellum (a fine-grained animal hide), but visitors may only view it through a
thick sheet of protective glass. The other two perfect copies are held in the
British National Library.

A page from the Gutenberg Bible, published in
Latin, which visitors can view at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.